Thursday, June 4, 2015

With less than a week of school remaining, the 2014-2015 school year is winding down. And, it has been one of my favorite years of teaching yet! From Epic Rap Battles to choose-your-own-adventure stories, from Dickensian tea parties to Socratic smackdowns, my students have made amazing progress in their learning, and we've had so much fun!

As one culminating activity for the year, I wanted to use one of the new Google Doc add-ons I learned about on this week's #gafechat over Chrome Extensions and Drive Add-ons, Tag Cloud Generator. I asked my students to use three words to describe our class, which they plugged into this Google Form I made to keep things anonymous. (The best part--unlink the form and delete all responses each class period to keep re-using the same Form!) I copied the results to a Google Doc, chose "Add-ons" and "Get add-ons" to find Tag Cloud Generator and add, then clicked "Add-ons" again to choose "Tag Cloud Generator" to use it!

Tag Cloud Generator created a beautiful word cloud right in my Doc of all the words used!

It is important to note that students should use single words when possible. If they used phrases to describe our class, I asked the to link the words by using hyphens to connect them; that way, they showed up together in the word cloud! It took fewer than five minutes, and I shared a screenshot of the wrod cloud with the whole class on Google Classroom!